Feral hogs are creating big problems for Louisiana farmers and other landowners — and they're growing in numbers rapidly.

In fact, they reproduce so quickly that they appear to be on a track to greatly exceed their current population of about 500,000 in Louisiana and 10 million nationwide.

Farmers, hunters and other residents gathered for a meeting Monday evening in Colfax to find out the latest LSU AgCenter research on trying to combat the swine, which tear up crops and pastureland and which can spread diseases to humans and other animals.

Glen Gentry, an animal science researcher for the LSU AgCenter, told the crowd of about 40 people how the swine got to North America in the first place and how their numbers have grown drastically over the years.

"The problem with the wild pigs is their reproductive capability. They reproduce so fast," Gentry said.

"If you wiped out 70 percent of them tomorrow and then didn't touch them again, I'm thinking probably in three years or four years, you'd be back where you are now," he said Tuesday in speaking to The Town Talk about the wild pig problem.

One sow and her offspring can produce about 250 piglets in about four years and a couple of years after that, the numbers are in the thousands, he said. Pigs reach sexual maturity in about six months, and each pig lives an average of seven to nine years.

Donna Morgan of the LSU AgCenter said the hogs are a statewide problem and that the meeting was held in Colfax because residents from that area had asked for an update on the issue.

"We had folks there who were up in arms about pig damage, and we had folks there that are hunters and like the pigs. There were folks on both sides of the aisle," Gentry said about the Colfax meeting.

The feral swine are estimated to cause more than $1 billion in damage to farms nationwide.

Feral hogs are expensive to try to control.

"The majority of them, they (affected landowners) shoot them (pigs) or they trap them and shoot them," Morgan said.

Some people eat them, "but there's such a large population in the state that you just can't shoot and eat enough of them," Morgan said.

"They do taste good," Gentry said. "People do eat them."

Gentry said an AgCenter study is testing ways to control the feral swine population through bait that would contain sodium nitrite.

"We're trying to determine the lethal dose of sodium nitrite that will kill 90 percent of pigs that we feed it to," Gentry said.

Feral pigs are being captured for the experiments.

The sodium nitrite can take the oxygen out of a hog's blood through the formation of methemoglobin, leading to their deaths. Deer and other animals are not as sensitive to the chemical.

The poisonous bait would be "another tool in the toolbox" to try to combat the hogs.

It's expensive to trap hogs or shoot hogs, Gentry said. In Texas, the best method has been "aerial gunning" — shooting hogs from a helicopter — and "it's about $18 to $20 a pig."

In Louisiana, because of its terrain and canopy of trees, the cost in using that method is about $158 a pig.

He said the wild pigs are not native to the Americas.

"It's thought that they came on with (Spanish explorer Hernando) DeSoto's expedition in 1539," Gentry said.

The Eurasian boar was brought to a hunting preserve in North Carolina in 1912 and then spread to other areas. Some escaped and cross-bred with escaped wild pigs from production facilities, "and what we have now in the wild is basically a hybrid of those two animals," Gentry said.